Abstract
Haptic and visuo-haptic feedback for guiding laparoscopic surgery gestures
Due mainly to drastically shortened recovery times,
lower overall cost and better patient
outcomes, minimally invasive surgery (MIS) is growi
ng standard for many surgical
interventions. However, the characteristics of MIS
incur severe perceptual and motor
limitations, such as partial loss of visual depth p
erception, difficult hand-eye coordination
and distorted haptic sensation. These limitations,
in turn, have been shown to affect
surgical performance – resulting in some cases in i
ncreased complication rates and intra-
operative injuries when compared to the correspondi
ng open surgery procedures.
We hypothesize that the perceptual limitations inhe
rent to MIS settings may be overcome
at least in part by providing additional informatio
n on the state of the surgical instrument
and its interaction with manipulated organs to the
surgeon during the operation. Using
forms of augmented reality, we thereby hope to brin
g the quality surgical gesture
performance in MIS back on par with that in open su
rgery.
Our initial experiments focus on the problem of ass
isting the surgeon in precisely guiding a
surgical instrument tip within the patient’s abdome
n. The idea is to acquire the position of
the instrument tip in space using sensors mounted o
n the instrument and to feed back the
minimum amount of information relevant to the surgi
cal task in order for the surgeon to
not deviate further from a target trajectory in MIS
than he would in a comparable open
surgery setting.
Initial results show promising potential for the us
e of tactile feedback embedded within the
handle of a surgical instrument in order to feed ba
ck information to the user, improving
his/her execution of complicated gestures.